The invention relates to a one-piece two-leg contact spring having opposite mirrored contact rounded cups manufactured from a metal strip by continuous stamping, with preliminary bending of the entrance region formed by the free ends of the legs.
For manufacturing a two-leg contact spring with a small, e.g., 2.5 mm, width of the slot defined by the two legs, and at a small cost, it is necessary to stamp it out from a continuous metal strip in an appropriate stamp. The ends of the legs of the contact spring produced by this method make it difficult to produce a required bi-lateral contact because, with conventional production methods of forming U-shaped contact body, it cannot be placed any longer into a stamp.
German Patent No. 3,324,737 discloses rather complicated and expensive devices of and methods for shearing, bending and/or bonding to obtain a desired geometry of the finished article.
Accordingly, the object of the invention is a one-piece two-leg contact spring, with opposite mirrored contact rounded cups, which can be simply produced from a flat metal strip by-a simple manufacturing process.
This, and other objects of the invention which will become apparent hereinafter, are achieved by providing a one-piece two-leg contact spring of the above-discussed type in which the first and second legs and the connection portion lie in a common plane, with the first and second legs having free ends forming an entrance region and defining opposite mirrored contact rounded cups at the entrance region, and with each of the free and being bent off by an angle of 90xc2x0 from the common plane along an elastic line, which extends at an acute angle to an axis of symmetry of the contact spring.